The use of personal computers (PCs) for leisure as well as for work and education poses problems for employers and supervisors wishing to monitor PC usage. Whilst many employees and students can be trusted to use their PC appropriately, some cannot. Also, the ease with which PC users can switch between work and education to leisure usage means that even well meaning users can easily become distracted from the task in hand.
PCs typically run multiple applications simultaneously and so, for example, a professional user such as a patent attorney learning online as part of a continuing professional development (CPD) or continuing education (CE) programme will probably also have their personal e-mail and other applications running on the PC at that time. CPD programmes typically require the professional to log their CPD activity units and classify these according to the development tasks carried out. Monitoring CPD activity can be achieved easily in the case of attendance at a course or lecture series, for example, but monitoring online learning activities is a greater challenge. Not only does this rely on the honesty of the professional but also upon the ability of even honest professionals to record their activities accurately.
The above is one of many examples where monitoring of computer usage is of paramount importance. Other examples include monitoring of employee computer activity in the workplace. Whilst spyware and other malicious software have shown tracking a user's every action to be technologically achievable, security issues, privacy, and ethics hinder observing a user's actions beyond one's own website. Therefore, whilst monitoring usage of locally stored pages by an application is relatively easy, the application cannot be used to monitor usage of external web pages. Often local pages have links to external websites and so accurate usage monitoring can be a real problem.
There is therefore a need in the art for an application which can accurately monitor computer usage, and in particular usage of external web pages.